Handing over the search removes a task people are poorly placed to do

The argument

A second argument offered for this explanation is about competence rather than about burden. Choosing a spouse, proponents point out, requires predicting how a person will behave over decades, under strain, in circumstances neither party can foresee. Almost nothing in the usual conditions of courtship gives access to that. What courtship displays is how someone conducts themselves while trying to be chosen, which is close to the least informative sample available, and it is assessed by someone whose judgement is at that moment least reliable. The argument is that others are better placed for parts of this task, not because they are wiser in general but because they are differently situated. People who have known a candidate and their family over years have seen them in conditions courtship never produces: in illness, in money trouble, in quarrels, among those they have no reason to impress. They are also assessing without the particular distortion that attraction introduces, and they can ask directly about matters the interested party cannot raise without giving offence. Holders of this explanation are usually explicit about the limits of the claim. Those conducting the search have interests of their own, which may include standing, obligation or convenience, and these can override the welfare of the person being matched; the argument works only to the extent that the arrangers are both well informed and well intentioned. What they claim is narrower than it is often taken to be: that the specific job of predicting long term compatibility is one that observers with a long record of the candidate can do better than the candidate's suitor can, and that a marriage founded on the better assessment has a correspondingly better chance of lasting.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Opponents argue that the premise about distortion is doing too much work. Attraction supplies information of its own about whether two people can live together, and third parties assessing compatibility are prone to their own distortions, weighting family standing, wealth and reputation precisely because those are what an outside observer can see. They also note that the argument is conditional on good intentions it cannot guarantee, and that a conclusion resting on arrangers being both well informed and disinterested says little about arrangements in general. Several add that the ability to predict compatibility is not obviously the thing that makes a marriage work.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] Long acquaintance with a family reveals how someone behaves among relatives, which is weak evidence about how they will behave as a spouse. [Rejecting P3] Outside observers have characteristic distortions of their own, weighting what is visible from outside such as standing and wealth over what matters inside a marriage. [Rejecting C] The conclusion holds only where arrangers are both well informed and disinterested, and the argument supplies no reason to expect that combination.